There’s nothing special about today’s date but I feel it’s a good time to write a bit about my experience at Mozilla so far.

First days. Joining Mozilla was, at least in the first few weeks, a rather scary experience. Mostly because it was an unknown territory—both socially and technically—and I had a lot of catching up to do. The amount of information you have to assimilate in order to understand how things are done is a bit overwhelming. But here I am, I survived! And still catching up.

Remote. One of the main concerns I had when I joined Mozilla was the working-from-home part. I’ve done it before but not for so long. It turned out to be a good experience and enjoyed it in many ways. But I still missed meeting workmates in person and having a more clearly separate environment for work. So, I’m glad that the awesome London office is now open!

Hacker-friendliness. Mozilla is a very friendly environment for hackers: meritocratic, pragmatic, and virtually bullshit-free. Feels good. You’re pretty much free to decide what to do next with very simple guidance as to what has higher priority at point in the development process.

Passion. Mozilla’s mission is taken very seriously. You see that reflected in every small and big decision inside the organization. Being a non-profit organization with such a worthy mission is very liberating because you can express your passion with no excuses. Mozillians are very passionate people.

Quick stats. I joined Mozilla 238 days ago. Since then, as part of my work at the company, I pushed 204 changesets, changed ~7,395 lines of code, fixed 106 bugs, gave 2 talks, travelled to 4 countries, and met a huge number of smart people.

This year’s FOSDEM was a special one for me. It was the first time I attended it as a Mozillian! I had already met quite a few European community members at MozCamp Europe last year but this FOSDEM was a great opportunity to meet even more Mozillians face-to-face. I stayed at the Mozilla DevRoom most of the conference but also spent some time catching up with my fellow GNOME hackers.

Chris and I gave a “State of Firefox Mobile” talk on Sunday. I usually don’t share my slides because they tend to be too short in content to be useful. However, we wrote some speaker notes that give enough information and context on what we talked about. So, here’s the deck alternating between slides and speaker notes—I wish Speaker Deck had proper support for speaker notes…

All in all, I had a great time at FOSDEM this year! PS: The weather during the conference was quite special too—in a painful way!

It’s been a month since Johnathan publicly announced the native UI for Firefox on Android. So it’s probably a good time to give everyone a quick status update. In case you haven’t heard about it yet, we are re-implementing Fennec’s UI using Android’s native platform to be able to deliver a much better performance and UX to our users on Android devices.

In terms of architecture, one of the key points of the native UI is to move Gecko and XUL out of Firefox’s startup path on Android. This way, the UI can start up and respond to user interaction immediately while Gecko and XUL load and run on a separate thread. The communication between Gecko and the native UI then happens through a simple message system. This means we’re replacing Electrolysis with a lighter architecture that brings similar benefits. For the curious, Mark Finkle wrote an architecture overview with more details.

We’re landing the new code on a separate repository called “birch” which will eventually be merged in mozilla-central. Large parts of the primary browser UI have already been implemented—AwesomeBar, tabs, bookmarking, notification popups, addons manager, preferences, context menus, and more. We also have a new panning/zooming implementation that is extremely fast and smooth. The design team is bringing a new phone UI for Firefox that is both beautiful and simpler. The new design is part of a wider effort to streamline the Firefox UX on all platforms, desktop and mobile.

This is all very exciting but there’s still a lot to do to make it all feature-complete, stable, and ready for users. If you want to help us with feedback and testing, install the native UI’s nightly build on your Android phone. Don’t have an Android phone? Mozilla can give you one! Have a look at our Test Drivers program page for more information.

It’s key to Mozilla’s mission to have a strong presence on the mobile web space. We’re working hard to make Firefox the most exciting mobile browser on Android. Development is moving insanely fast and I can’t wait to see the new UI delivered to our users next year!

I’ve volunteered to be a community steward for the Mobile team as part of the Contributor Stewards program that has been recently created in Mozilla. My role as a community steward is to find ways to get more people involved in Firefox Mobile.

As a first step, I thought it would be a good idea to create a Get Involved page for the Mobile team. This page is meant to have only the minimal steps to start contributing to different areas of the project—it shouldn’t feel overwhelming. For now, it only has content for hacking and testing but it will include other areas soon.

I have also compiled a list of bugs that are good for first-time contributors and assigned mentors to each of them. The mentors and other team members will assist you with any missing information and useful source code links.

If you’re still unsure where to start after reading the Get Involved page, we’re always on IRC to answer any questions you might have. Firefox Mobile is a key part of Mozilla’s future and is definitely an exciting project to be part of. Join us!

My patches to add HTML5 form validation support to Firefox Mobile have landed in trunk yesterday. This feature has been available on desktop since Firefox 4 but it wasn’t implemented in Firefox Mobile until now.

In case you haven’t heard about it, HTML5 supports automatic input validation. This means that your browser can take care of validating form fields for you—no need to write custom JavaScript code to check for required fields or validate common types of input such as numbers, emails, URLs, etc.

So, how does HTML5 form validation look in Firefox Mobile? Very similar to Firefox on desktop. If you submit a form that contains any invalid data—an invalid email address, a required field that was not filled in, and so on—the form will not be submitted, all invalid fields will be marked with a subtle red border, and the first invalid element will be automatically focused showing its respective validation message (see image above).

As far as I know, the only mobile browsers that support HTML5 form validation right now are Firefox and Opera. You can try this feature on our mobile nightly build. As usual, general feedback, bug reports, and patches are welcome!

We, Firefox Mobile front-enders, have been working hard for the last few weeks to get the new Firefox UI for tablets in place for general testing. It has now reached a functional state that is good enough for getting some early feedback. So, how can you help us?

First of all, you can simply install Fennec’s nightly build on your Android tablet and give us some thoughtful feedback on the UI. File bugs for the missing bits from the planned design, report interaction problems, let us know about broken bits, etc.

Secondly, if you want to contribute code, have a look at our current list of tablet-related bugs—see the dependent bugs—and let us know what bugs you want to work on. Setting up a Fennec development environment is fairly simple, you can find instructions in the wiki. Feel free to ask for help either on IRC (#mobile at irc.mozilla.org) or on the specific bug reports. Just ping mfinkle, mbrubeck, wesj, sriram, or me.

Keep in mind that this is very early stage work. There are lots of rough edges and design is continuously evolving. In case you missed it, Ian Barlow, from our Mobile design team, has blogged about the tablet UI design a couple of weeks ago—definitely worth reading. This is all looking very promising and we can’t wait to get it out to users once it’s ready!

This is my first post aggregated on both Planet Mozilla and Planet Mozilla Mobile. I guess it’s a good time to introduce myself to the Mozilla community. I joined Mozilla about a month ago to work on Firefox Mobile. I’ll be mostly focusing on UI-related bits and pieces of Fennec as part of the front-end group—which is in fact what I’m most passionate about.

Before Mozilla, I worked for three years at litl—a Boston-based startup—where I hacked on the cloud-based OS that powers the webbook. The litl OS is almost entirely written in JavaScript and it was while working on it that I really got hooked into the language. Before litl, I was part of Maemo’s UI framework team at Nokia where I worked throughout the entire development cycle of the N810 internet tablet.

I’m also a long time GNOME contributor. I’ve done all sorts of things in the project such as being a member of GNOME Foundation’s Board of Directors, being part of GNOME’s release team, and maintaining a few official modules. I don’t hold any official positions in the project anymore but I’m still working on a cool spare-time project based on GNOME platform.

My first month at Mozilla has been great overall. To be honest, I felt a bit overwhelmed in the first couple of weeks. It’s a quite humbling experience to join such a large community full of extremely talented and passionate contributors. It’s a whole new world to me and I’m learning quite a bit everyday—which is the very reason I joined Mozilla anyway. I hope to be blogging soon about the latest news on Fennec development. For instance, there’s some really exciting work being done on the tablet UI for Fennec now! Stay tuned!

I could not attend GUADEC last year for a very good reason. So I’m really happy that I’ll be able to go to Berlin for the second Desktop Summit this year! This is my first GNOME conference without holding any official roles in the project since 2007. This means I’ll hopefully have more time to just hang out with my fellow hackers. I’ll arrive on the 6th of August and leave on the 10th.

I guess it’s a good time to announce that I’ll be giving two talks this year. The first one is about GNOME development in JavaScript with Gjs. It will be on the 7th of August (Sunday) at 9h40 in the morning. Hopefully, a few attendees will wake up earlier for this talk!

The second talk is about The Board, one of my current pet projects, which you have probably heard about. I’ll demonstrate the current features and talk about the future plans for the app. I hope to finish some awesome new features in time for the conference. Let’s see. This talk will be on the 8th of August (Monday) at 14h40.

This is also my first open source conference as a Mozillian. So, if you want to know a bit more about Firefox Mobile, just find me at the conference venue for a chat. All in all, I’m very excited about the conference this year! See you all there!

Davi Moraes is mostly known as the guitarist who played with famous Brazilian artists like Caetano Veloso and Vanessa da Mata. He’s a remarkable sideman but his solo albums are well worth having a look. Orixá Mutante is Davi’s second album released in 2004.

The album opens with Ganzá which has one of the grooviest guitar riffs I’ve ever seen. Som das Ruas follows with high-vibe funky beat. Pretoriana and I’m Still in Love with You bring the reggae sauce to the pot. Tô na Sua is a slow tempo funky balad with amazing vocalized guitar solos. Liquidificador de Orixás is a punchy afrobeat a la Femi Kuti. The album also features the original recording of Café com Pão which became a big hit a few years later in Salvador’s carnival.

Orixá Mutante is a great showcase of what I consider the best side of axé music. A fusion of all sorts of music genres, from Afro-Caribbean to funk. Style-wise, this album is similar to some of the best stuff by Carlinhos Brown such as Omelete Man which is, in my opinion, Brown’s greatest masterpiece. What differentiates Davi from Brown is his lyrical style as well as his strong focus on the overlayed guitar riffs.

This album should definitely be in your playlist if you enjoy good afro-groovy music!

As a good Brazilian, I love good coffee. Here’s a short list of my favourite coffee shops in London. Most of them are in central London because they are close to litl’s office in Tottenham Court Road, where I worked for more than two years.

Monmouth. I usually go to their Covent Garden branch at Monmouth Street. Small, cosy, and earthy. They have two other branches. They import and provide coffee for restaurants too. For instance, my favourite pizza place in London serves Monmouth’s coffee. Perfect combination!

Milk Bar. Tiny coffee shop at Bateman street. Young and indie atmosphere. They expose art work from local artists in their shop, pretty cool.

Tapped & Packed. They are at Rathbone Place, number 26. Keep the street number in mind because the name of the shop is not shown anywhere—as far as I could see. They serve the tallest Victoria sponge I’ve ever seen!

Sacred. This is a little coffee place inside the Westfield shopping centre in Shepherds Bush. They have the creamiest flat white. Delicious!

If you have any other suggestions, please post them as comments. I’m definitely looking forward to hearing about other good coffee places in the city!